It is compatible with AIM and ICQ (Oscar protocol), MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, IRC, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, SILC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus Sametime, and Zephyr networks. Gaim users can log in to multiple accounts on multiple IM networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on AOL Instant Messenger, talking to a friend on Yahoo Messenger, and sitting in an IRC channel all at the same time.

Pidgin supports many features of the various networks, such as file transfer, away messages, and typing notification. It also goes beyond that and provides many unique features. A few popular features are Buddy Pounces, which give the ability to notify you, send a message, play a sound, or run a program when a specific buddy goes away, signs online, or returns from idle; and plugins, consisting of text replacement, a buddy ticker, extended message notification, iconify on away, spell checking, tabbed conversations, and more. Pidgin runs on a number of platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Qtopia (Sharp Zaurus and iPaq).

What's New:

General

Check the basic constraints extension when validating SSL/TLS certificates. This fixes a security hole that allowed a malicious man-in-the-middle to impersonate an IM server or any other https endpoint. This affected both the NSS and GnuTLS plugins. (Discovered by an anonymous person and Jacob Appelbaum of the Tor Project, with thanks to Moxie Marlinspike for first publishing about this type of vulnerability. Thanks to Kai Engert for guidance and for some of the NSS changes) (CVE-2014-3694)

Allow and prefer TLS 1.2 and 1.1 when using the NSS plugin for SSL. (Elrond and Ashish Gupta) (#15909)

libpurple3 compatibility

Encrypted account passwords are preserved until the new one is set.

Fix loading Google Talk and Facebook XMPP accounts.

Windows-Specific Changes

Don't allow overwriting arbitrary files on the file system when the user installs a smiley theme via drag-and-drop. (Discovered by Yves Younan of Cisco Talos) (CVE-2014-3697)

Updates to dependencies

NSS 3.17.1 and NSPR 4.10.7

Finch

Fix build against Python 3. (Ed Catmur) (#15969)

Gadu-Gadu

Updated internal libgadu to version 1.12.0.

Groupwise

Fix potential remote crash parsing server message that indicates that a large amount of memory should be allocated. (Discovered by Yves Younan and Richard Johnson of Cisco Talos) (CVE-2014-3696)

IRC

Fix a possible leak of unencrypted data when using /me command with OTR. (Thijs Alkemade) (#15750)